1 juni 2010

Copyright conservatives win vote on Gallo report in JURI

Rapporteur Marielle Gallo (EPP, FR) in the legal affairs committee JURI just before the vote

This morning, the controversial ”Gallo report” about copyright enforcement was voted in the legal affairs committee JURI in the European Parliament.

It was a defeat for the Pirate/Green/Social Democrat side, who wanted the Commission to start evaluating copyright legislation in a fact based way, with a view to eventually legalizing non-commercial file sharing.

Instead the copyright conservatives won, with a majority consisting in most cases of the Christian Democrat group EPP, the Conservative group ECR, and the Liberal group ALDE.

In the final vote the report was adopted with 13 votes against 8, with some liberals abstaining in the end.

As it now stands, the Gallo report calls for stricter enforcement to be the focus of the Commission’s work on copyright. It asks for more figures on the impact of non-commercial file sharing to be collected, but instead of waiting for those figures to be evaluated, the report jumps the gun and asks for more and stricter enforcement of today’s copyright, regardless of what the facts may turn out to be.

This was a defeat, but the last word has not been said yet.

The next step is the vote in plenary. It is currently scheduled to take place in Strasbourg in the week starting June 14, but it is not at all impossible that it will be postponed to the last Strasbourg session before the summer break, in the week starting July 5. We’ll see, in due course.

In any case, I will be tabling an alternative resolution in plenary. Although the vote in the legal affairs committee JURI was a defeat on more or less all points, we were defeated by a quite narrow majority in most cases.

If we can get in particular the liberal Members of the European Parliament to think about the issue before the final vote in plenary, we have a quite realistic chance of actually winning in the end.

To have a chance, we will have to put in a lot of hard work, but it’s not impossible.

Share this:

Gilla

Relaterade

5 kommentarer

Time to ask for whom the bell tolls. Again.

One thing I’d be interested in seeing is for commission and parliament to receive a summarized report on the practicalities of filesharing. Perhaps then some would start critizising the pre-digested and from a factfinding viewpoint heavily mutilated ”reports” which get pushed down political throats by the overpaid media lobby.

The dutch government and the norwegian business school have both published studies effectively disproving the thesis that copyright violation in the form of illicit file sharing harm markets. A study commissioned by microsoft as early as 2005 came to the conclusion that filesharing networks, no matter their legal status, are for keeps. And so on.

Why aren’t all the government-sponsored studies and reports from highly credited universities who stand in direct contradiction to the Gallo report being highlighted? Or is it just that they have been shown but every time a parliamentary member listens to the ”wrong” person he gets three lobbyists tossed at him?

@Scary Devil Monastery :
La Quadrature du Net and other citizen groups have contacted members of the JURI. They told them about all these studies and figures you are talking about (@Mr. Engström, could you confirm that?). With help from the Social Science Research Council and the recent study of the american Government Accountbility Office, they even proved that the TERA study is totally wrong (Gallo used this study to build her report. This document was, of course, sponsored by anti-piracy lobbies such as the BASCAP).

So, MEPs are aware of those facts. But lobbyists are way more powerful and organized than citizen groups, so it’s a lot easier for them to ”convince” people…

@Mr. Engström, thanks for your hard work. I have to admit that the vote of this report was quite disgusting but, if I understand correctly, you think we still have a chance to ”fix” it before it is adopted in plenary. As a Member of the European Parliament, what do you think we, citizens, could do to help you?